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Summary: Chapter XX
Motivating and Retaining CS2 Students with a
Competitive Game Programming Project
RYAN GARLICK1
and ROBERT AKL2
1,2
University of North Texas, Department of Computer Science and
Engineering, Denton, TX 76203, USA. E-mail: garlick@unt.edu,
rakl@cse.unt.edu
The widespread goals of student retention, introducing larger programming projects,
and fostering collaboration among students in computer science courses has led to
the inclusion of group projects in many curricula, with task division and
collaboration as motivation for students to complete assignments. This paper
presents a study in a first-year programming assignment with similar goals, but with
methods adopting the contrarian view having students directly and individually
compete with one another in a tournament of their respective software agents. This
paper presents the results of a year-long experiment in an intra-class competitive
assignment in the second C++ programming course at the University of North Texas
in Denton. Metrics of student performance on the assignment, correlation with
course grade, student surveys of the project, and retention statistics are presented.
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